A leak of the country’s national development plan for 2007-13 recommends that €15.3 billion from the Union’s cohesion fund should go to improving Poland’s transport infrastructure, compared to €5.3bn for environmental protection. Within transport spending, roads are favoured over railways, with €11.2bn allocated to road and €4.1bn to railways.

Green groups argue that the plan would breach Poland’s commitments as an EU member. By giving more to the private car than public transport, they say, the resulting carbon dioxide emissions would flout Warsaw’s obligations under the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

Campaigners are angered too by the ratio between transport and the environment. They say it reverses the practice in place since 1993 that spending under the Cohesion Fund is divided equally between transport and environment projects. They also complain that the plan does not adhere to the EU’s 2001 White Paper on transport, which set the aim of moving transport from road to rail.

“The proposals for the transport sector have little to do with sustainable modes of transport,” said Andrzej Gula from the Polish Institute on Environmental Economics.

Friends of the Earth spokeswoman Magda Stoczkiewicz said: “EU taxpayers’ resources should not be used by any country in violation of the EU’s commonly agreed objectives, such as decoupling economic growth from transport growth, shifting transport investment from roads to rail and achieving Kyoto targets in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

A spokesman for the Polish infrastructure ministry said the practice of splitting funding equally between transport and the environment “does not seem to be an optimal choice” for the country. The country’s transport infrastructure, he said, was a “particularly neglected area”.

The capacity of the road system was almost exhausted, he added, so greater investment in it was required to cope with the rising levels of car ownership and to boost safety.

Malgorzata Krzysztoszek from the Polish Confederation of Private Employers contended that expenditure on roads should be even higher than the amounts foreseen by the government.

“The infrastructure in Poland is really bad,” she said. “We have lost big investors because of infrastructure. Toyota, for example, decided on Slovakia instead of Poland for this reason.”